Children love to raid the household recycling bin. Old cereal boxes become doll houses, tin cans snare drums. What better place for scenes made from recyclable material than a kids’ store?
Posh Kids routinely features recyclable and upcycled materials in their window displays on Box Butte Avenue in Alliance.
Posh Shoppe Leader Allie Gruber designs and stages the display. She has been at the children’s clothing store for the past three years.
As a consignment store, Gruber noted the clothes are somewhat recycled. As for the window, she said, “We use a lot of newspaper and cardboard and a lot of paper in general. We get them (materials) from people in the community. We use boxes to prop things up.”
Right now the display has a lot of newspaper tassels. This batch of papers came from a local woman’s basement.
For a past display they made some trees. “Ladies dropped off oatmeal containers we made into trunks for a jungle scene,” Gruber recalled. They also got a bag of yarn and made tassels and pom poms. “We had people drop off egg cartons and we made flowers out of those,” she added.
Once they receive items, the materials are often reused in the display multiple times a year.
Gruber said her ideas mostly come from Pintrist and sometimes from Instagram. She will research ideas and pull hashtags from them. “It’s usually myself and another girl who works here, Jennifer helps with the windows,” she said. “Since I’ve worked here it’s been that way. I think we’ve always used items people have dropped off or we’ve collected. . . . A lot of times if there’s something we’re looking for we do Facebook posts and people will bring something in.”
The recycling scene has caught the eye of many shoppers. “We have a lot of people who come in because of our window display because it’s interesting.”